The blurber from the Irish Times on the front cover has this to say, and I think it’s true:

"Nothing, not even history itself, prepares the reader for the paralysing beauty of the images that emerge from these stories written by a Bosnian survivor of the siege of Sarajevo."

The first story, ‘Dafna Pehfogl Crosses the Bridge between There and Here’, features the vivid image of Dafna, cursed since birth, poised on the bridge which separates the besieged city from safety with her family on the other side. Although the prose is restrained throughout the collection and there is very little description of the savagery of this siege, the sense of horror is held only in abeyance. The story begins with Dafna’s faith in the arrangements for the prohibited crossing which her family despite their petty cruelties have arranged and then segues to her unhappy birth, her failure with suitors and how the modest book of expectation closed over the girlhood of Dafna Pehfogl and an old maid’s cards were laid out on the table. There is a ghastly inevitability about the finale.

In ‘Greetings from the Besieged City’, a mother reads a story to her child, a routine that is for many of us a normal part of childhood that we maintained for our own children. But this mother, well aware of the fragility of life, changes the ending of a story because she wants to shield her child from the moment when the main character dies. Even though she knows it is futile to try to shield him from the inevitability of grief. There is also some ironic banter about postcards in this story, forcing the reader to imagine the cheery tourist postcards that we’re all familiar with, juxtaposed against the scenes of destruction and death that we saw so often on the television news.

The residents of an apartment block in ‘Thirst in Number Nine’ do not know each other until the day they flee to the cellar on a night when red-hot balls were falling onto the besieged city. The image that sears into the reader’s mind is of the little boy who is thirsty...

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/08/16/death-in-the-museum-of-modern-art-by-alma-la... ( )